2014 International Women’s Day - PwC highlights what can be done to help young women reach leadership positions

SINGAPORE, 5 March 2014 – To mark International Women’s Day on Saturday, 8th March 2014, PwC is releasing a report focusing on what organisations can do to create the right environment for millennial women to flourish in the workplace.

The report Next generation diversity – Developing tomorrow’s female leaders identifies six key themes which are integral to the successful attraction, retention and development of the female millennial.

This complements other research carried out by PwC on the millennial generation (see notes for more detail). Our observations have been fine-tuned to focus on the female part of this generation – helping us to better understand how millennial women can be developed into the leaders of tomorrow.

Some highlights of the PwC report include:

Female millennials matter because they are more highly educated and are entering the workforce in larger numbers than any of their previous generations.

The millennial woman is more confident than any female generation before her and highly rate opportunities for career progression.

Female millennials seek out employers with a strong record on diversity.

The millennial generation can be expected to drive unprecedented work life organisational culture shifts.

The female millennial expects regular feedback and despite being extremely tech-savvy, prefers important feedback discussions to take place face-to-face.

International experience is in high demand from this generation of women.

An employer or sectors image and reputation matters to the female millennial.

Yeoh Oon Jin, Executive Chairman, PwC Singapore said:

“Diversity is a key issue for us, which is why we are keen to focus on female millennials. We recruit a rich diversity of talent every year from local universities to institutions and organisations across the world, including thousands of very talented millennial women. We want to create an environment that will help these women succeed so that they’re primed for leadership in the future.”

“To achieve sustainable change, a focus on women in leadership is not enough. We must tackle diversity at a leadership level but also focus efforts on our workforce from day one. But to get this right, we must first better understand how to attract, develop, and retain millennial women.”